How does Mr Trump do it? How do his followers forgive him and make excuses for him while he systematically demolishes and perverts every one of their Conservative principles? Its not just his opponents’ Liberal principles, its his own, too! He gets away with things no other politician could have, on Left or Right. He really could shoot someone in Times Square in broad daylight and his followers would give him a Mulligan.

Its not due to any of his skills at public relations or media communication. No, I believe its his followers. The key to his fan loyalty is not due to him, it is due to the constituency he has chosen to be his fans. I don’t believe he has a political and social program and convinced his people to embrace it. He has done just the opposite, he has surveyed and polled the most vulnerable audience, the one most likely to be uncritically loyal, and then devised his program to meet their needs.

Those who follow Mr Trump feel a desperate need for what he is saying to be true, and when he is caught in a lie, or changes his mind, they shift right along with him rather than cast doubt on their hero. Any counterexample is simply ignored, or rationalized away, or blamed on Obama and Hillary, fake news and the Mainstream Media.

This type of loyalty is of a religious nature. I am familiar with it because I was exposed to it while growing up in the Christian fundamentalist rural South. This is how Islamic fanaticism works, too. Any criticism is dismissed as incontrovertible proof of apostasy. And I have seen it in my own family and had a chance to watch it operate in people I know and love. It is about a devotion born of fear. I’ve told this story here before, but it is relevant to my point, so please forgive me if I repeat it.

In my mother’s later years, she became a devotee of a spiritualist church. She used to be level-headed, cynical and practical, to a fault, but late in life she became tired and scared. She feared financial failure, the state of her health, and most of all she feared her own mortality. Her children had grown up to be independent and successful, but she also sensed that they were independent of her, they didn’t need her any more, and I think she resented that someday she might need them.

Somehow, these demons drove her to spiritualists and fortune tellers, mind readers and psychics, she started revisiting
the old Cuban voodoo rituals she had once disdained and ridiculed, and eventually drifted into the orbit of a charlatan minister who gathered his flock in a rented strip mall and performed seances, ectoplasmic manifestations, and all sorts of cheap parlor tricks. I attended a few of these sessions, and I had no idea how he performed these tricks (flying trumpets, voices and tappings from the walls, scarves fluttering in the dark, glowing mists, the usual stuff). But I’m a scientist, not a magician. I don’t have to know exactly how a fraud is pulled off to recognize it as a fraud. You can always tell by how it is delivered, and how the audience is targeted; how it is selected, and sold. Its not the product, its the marketing that always gives them away. The phony religion has no overall philosophical or spiritual underpinning, it is aimed at a specific audience with specific needs, an audience that is afraid—and angry.

These people fleece their flocks and I have no doubt my mother gave them money. I didn’t want to know. But one of their schemes was that the church had purchased a vast tract of land in Lutz, a rural area north of Tampa and, that for being remembered in your will, they would name one of the many sinkhole lakes in that Karst area after one of your departed relatives. They had no right or authority to name topographical features, and certainly they owned no land in Lutz, but that didn’t stop them from making the claims.

A few years later, while browsing in a bookstore, I came across a book by Mr Lamar Keene, “The Psychic Mafia”. I recognized the name, it was the same bogus reverend with the brocade tuxedoes, Hollywood hairdos and pancake makeup that preached at the “Church of the New Light”. Apparently, Mr Keene had gotten an attack of conscience and decided to get out of the conning-little-old-ladies racket. But not only did he quit the business, he wrote a book exposing the whole
scam. Not only did he give detailed explanations of how all the spirit manifestations were staged, he also blew the whistle on the psychic mafia. This was a term he coined for a network of fortune-telling scam artists scattered around the country who shared their files. Even if a mark moved to a different city, or changed mediums, the new spiritual adviser would be miraculously well-informed on the victim’s dead relatives, financial arrangements and personal problems. Keene apparently caused quite a seismic tremor in the spiritualist community for giving away the trade secrets. Reportedly, he received death threats.

Needless to say, when Mom read the book, she was devastated.
There was no denying this evidence, the confession came directly from the man himself, thoroughly documented, with photographs and diagrams. But in spite of that, she simply refused to believe she had been conned. She was so committed to the lie she simply could not let it go, no matter how compelling the evidence.

“I always knew there was an element of showmanship, but he simply knew too much he couldn’t have possible known for it to be all a swindle. There was a kernel of truth to it, there was something behind it.”

Sound familiar? Not the words, but the psychology behind them. Until she died, Mom kept up with her spiritualist beliefs, even though she did not patronize professional practitioners, (she had learned her lesson), but she couldn’t give up the idea. She was scared, she was facing a fearsome and uncertain future, and she simply could not let go of anything that might offer her even the slightest comfort.

Hitler still has followers, Stalin still has followers so does Saddam Hussein. I don’t even doubt Pol Pot still has nostalgic and reverent followers. These misguided souls are so terrified by an uncertain future they insist on embracing an idealized past that never really existed. And when you show them the evidence, no matter how convincing, that fear turns to anger, and then hate.

You can count on Mr Trump’s legacy being with us forever.